Difference between 2 word & 3 word keywords

I am trying to set up my own small consultancy for AdWords in India, though there is still so much to learn.

After spending a lot of time with customer queries & weeding out irrelevant queries & keywords, I homed in on a couple of pretty good keywords: Google AdWords PPC & Google AdWords Cost. Google AdWords Cost especially has had a terrific CTR, often touching 10%. The only problem is that it is costly & my budget is limited. I should mention I am using both of them as broad match, as the cost of broad modified or phrase keywords really takes off & even with phrase, there is just no assurance of a person converting.

So I thought it would be a good idea to use the shortened version of both: AdWords PPC & AdWords Cost. Though this is only the first day, but what I find is that the CTR has nosedived in both cases. I can't understand why. Why should dropping of "google", that too in broad match, make such a huge difference?

Re: Difference between 2 word & 3 word keywords

I would say that it's too early to predict the performance of both the keywords since it's only one day.

If you are running both the keywords in broad match type, then I think that won't be a wise strategy to go for since Broad is going to attract lot of irrelevant traffic.

So as per my understanding, best would be launch them in either phrase or least in broad modifier and then analyse the performance for at least a week to see how it goes. I know the keywords are costly, but if you have to sustain, you need to bid competitive enough to be in the competition and then slowly, fine tune your campaigns to improve the ad rank so that the your Avg CPC start reducing with time.

I have tried using Broad Modified & Exact Match, but they virtually double the cost. And that's been my experience with whatever other AdWords accounts I have seen.

I diligently look up the query per click per keyword & I am pretty confident that I have driven away a lot of irrelevant stuff through negative keywords.

Somehow, though a lot of people talk about long tail keywords, it's very hard to predict who is just clicking & who will eventually call or convert. Hence, I have sort of grown to prefer broad keywords mixed with negative keywords.

By any chance, is there a benchmark or clicks to leads ratio? I mean, if you have 20 clicks from relevant queries then it's likely that 2 will call?

Re: Difference between 2 word & 3 word keywords

I would say that the difference in your CTR was to be expected. A broad rule of thumb is that the shorter the keywords (that is, the fewer words in the keyword phrase), the wider the range of searches it could be matched to. So, your 'shortened' keywords are pulling from a wider range of searches.

You don't have a lot of budget for your campaign, and even your 'longer' two keywords here are pretty generic. Maybe you should be testing keywords that include concepts around finding a consultant or finding an agency to manage a PPC campaign? Even the one or two days of click data you have might give your some insight if you look at your search query report. You should find some examples of more specific searches that will attract the traffic that will be good for your purposes.

I'd also strongly recommend mining your search query report at least once a week to build up your negative keyword list to eliminate traffic that isn't valuable for your purpose.